Parametric Trough Solar Collector With Commercial Evacuated Receiver: Performance Comparison at Plant Level

A new anidolic parametric trough solar collector (PmTC) having 8.12 m net width aperture has been recently proposed for a commercial evacuated receiver tube with an absorber diameter of 70 mm. Since the collector was designed ignoring transmission, absorption, and reflection optical losses, calculations of the optical efficiency and the incidence angle modifier (IAM) by means of Monte Carlo spectral raytracing simulations using real slope errors distributions and taking into account Fresnel reflection losses were done. Comparison with an Eurotrough parabolic trough collector (PTC) shows an optical penalization of 5.1% due to the reflectivity and additional soiling of the secondary mirror, to an increase in the end losses and to the Fresnel reflection losses. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) system advisor model (SAM) was used to perform annual simulations of two commercial 50 MWe oil power plants without thermal energy storage located in Seville. A PTC solar field consisting of 90 loops, each one having four Eurotrough solar collector assemblies (SCA) with 150 m length was first modeled resulting in a gross production of 386 kWh/(m² yr). A PmTC solar field with the same module length and similar SCA net aperture area was also simulated. A final configuration of 94 loops and four SCAs with 100 m length per loop yields a gross production of 379 kWh/(m² yr) showing no improvement compared to the reference PTC plant. The present study allows to advance in the understanding of the potential of the anidolic optic to produce optical geometries able to effectively improve the PTC technology in the short-term projecting results at a commercial plant level.